Been collecting the Region 1 "20th Century Fox Studio Classics" series. Just the other day I popped in John Ford's "My Darling Clementine" for another look, having last watched it about 6 months ago, but this time the disc would not play.

After the two red copyright warning screens comes the disclaimer about remarks in the audio commentaries not reflecting the views of Fox, etc, and this is where the disc locks.

Checked other discs in the series that I've had for quite a while and all played OK except "Peyton Place" which locked in exactly the same place.

Noticed on both discs a slight fogging of the silver layer (under the disc surface). Co-incidentally, both these discs are double sided DVDs, none of the single sided discs in the series display this fault.

Fox USA have offered to replace them, but it would cost me more to post them from England to the USA than it would to buy new ones from DVD Soon (about £3-ish including delivery) but how do I know these discs won't deteriorate in a few months too?

Anyone else had similar problems or heard any reports of faults with this series?

Also had similar locking / non-playing problems with "Outer Limits - Original Series Vol 2" (Region 1) and "Giant " (Region 2) - again both these discs are double sided, but in this case not a blemish to be seen on the discs. Tried all of these discs on two DVD players and the DVD Rom drive of my PC with the same results. Are double sided discs more prone to problems for some reason?

D-Ball

04-23-05, 02:29 AM

It's not just you. More than half of the discs that I've problems with have been Fox titles.

rw2516

04-23-05, 10:38 AM

Maybe it's because both my player and tv are Sony but on older Fox titles that are 4x3 letterbox my TV automaticly, by itself, changes screen mode to zoom and displays the picture as if it was actually formatted to 16x9. Only on the fox titles. When I first got the tv one of the first discs I watched was Broken Arrow. Hit play in the menu and the movie started and I thought, "I didn't think this was anamorphic?" Had to go back to menu to turn on 5.1 because default was 2.0 and discovered the menu was zoomed. Tried all the older 4x3 Fox titles(Planet of Apes sequels, etc.) and they all do it.